Alexis...no, Arven slowly tired sitting up again, and this time, he succeeded. Though every muscle in his body screamed in protest, he clenched his jaw and forced himself upright.
Slowly he looked around what seemed to be his room, noting how backwards this world was compared to Earth.
Orris was a world far removed from the civilization he once knew. It looked a lot similar to Earth's bronze age, yet at the same time not.
According to this body's, this world was separated between six kingdoms constantly stuck in war and the ones that decided how the tides of war would shift were blacksmiths.
From the quality of weapons forged in their fires, to the armor that shielded soldiers, the skill of a single blacksmith could tilt the balance of power. Kings and nobles vied for them, and armies marched only as far as their smiths' craft allowed.
And this placed them at a hierarchy just below the royal family. To quicken the pace of civilization, each blacksmith was granted land based on their skill and rank, according to the Smith's guild evaluation.
The higher ranked you are, the closer to the capital you'd be assigned land. Lands granted to talented blacksmiths were always resource-filled and strategically chosen.
There were always Ore veins, forests for charcoal, rivers for cooling and transport, everything a smith could ever need to create works of wonder.
But for blacksmiths like Arven and his father, blacksmiths with skills that barely crossed the threshold, they'd be granted wastelands.
Lands that none of the six kingdoms would bother fighting over or even wanted. Barren soil, scarce water, and barely a vein of usable ore in sight.
It was a cruel reminder from the Guild of how much of a failure you were.
For the past ten years, Arvin and his father lived here, with the residents that had been for generations, until Arvin's father recently succumbed to an unknown disease and the wasteland was automatically handed to him.
He had inherited not only the barren land but also the heavy mantle of responsibility that came with it.
A smith's land was more than just dirt and stone. It was a contract, an oath signed between the Guild and the blacksmith. To abandon it was to be branded an oathbreaker—stripped of one's title, forbidden from ever setting foot in another forge, and cast out to live as nothing more than a beggar.
And so, even here, in another world and in the middle of nowhere, Alexis was shackled to the wasteland.
The forge stood at the heart of the settlement, a squat building of stone and soot, where his father's hammer had once rung proudly but now sat silent, cold.
A few dozen families made up the rest of the land, farmers who fought every year to coax something edible out of the soil, hunters who braved the barren plains for game, and traders who passed through rarely, often only when desperate.
All of them looked to the blacksmith for protection, for better tools and for the faintest sliver of hope that their lives could be better.
But Arven knew the truth: in this world, he was a blacksmith in name only. His father had never risen above the lowest copper rank, and Arven himself had no skill with the hammer, no mastery of the fire. By the Guild's standards, he was already a failure.
"How fitting," he muttered. "Born a genius on Earth, reborn a failure here. But…"
A grin appeared on his face as he continued.
"If this world places blacksmiths above all else… then I'll become the greatest blacksmith Orris has ever seen."
As a Material science and engineering professor, this was the perfect testing grounds for him.
Unlike Earth, where the advancement was so much that the world was reluctant for innovation anymore, Orris was still a newborn excited to welcome the creations of its blacksmiths.
His knowledge of materials and engineering would set him far above the rest, a foundation that would not only help him rise but also turn the dreams he once held on Earth into reality.
Excitement filled him as he thought of the possibilities, of the heights he could take this young world.
Arvin felt as if he was back to his childhood back on Earth where he first discovered his love for science.
The difference now was that the canvas was blank, untouched by the countless hands of scholars and inventors that had crowded Earth.
Here, no one had yet dreamed of alloys beyond mixing copper and tin to make bronze, no one knew of steel just yet, no one had even considered the marvels of chemistry that lay hidden in plain sight.
This world was so so crude that Ale—Arvin couldn't wait to see what heights he could take it.
"But first thing's first," he muttered, slowly moving from a sitting to standing position, "let's turn my Wasteland into a place worth living in."
Wobbly, he walked towards the small window that let in sunlight and peeked through it.
True to the judgement of the kingdoms, the guilds and other nobles, this place really was a wasteland, its soil lacking the least bit of water content.
The wasteland was called Grimholt, a desolate stretch of land lying between Ostoria and Valmere.
It was a relatively big territory, easily the size of a city and more, but it had been left unclaimed by the two kingdoms for generations.
To them, Grimholt was a land that wasn't worth the effort. It was too barren to farm on, too poor to mine, and too far from their capitals to transport anything worthwhile.
That is, until the Guild began sending its lowest-ranked smiths to occupy it.
When his father had been sent here, Arven—then just a boy—had followed. The land had greeted them with nothing but dust, cracked earth, and a sky that refused to give them rain.
Ten years later, nothing had changed.
Arven leaned against the wooden frame of the window, his eyes narrowing at the horizon.
This was his starting point, a land seen as worthless by all, even its residents but to him, it was a blank slate.
With a small smile, he muttered, "let's get started then"